Frost alarm, anyone?

by Charlie Peverett in At home on 01.05.08

Woke up today and the house was chilly. My first thought, other than ‘has the boiler broken?’ (thankfully, it hadn’t), was for the rather delicate runner bean and sweet pea plants I had placed ‘temporarily’ in the back garden when the weather got warm last week.

I’d thought ‘temporarily’ because I’d started them off indoors and planned to harden them off gradually - exposing them to a little wind and proper sunshine during the day and bringing them back inside in the evening.

But the prospect of a warm, still night turned that initial day’s outing into a lengthier exposure, and they’ve been out there ever since. I have to admit this happens most years for us. There’s a spring sowing frenzy one sunny weekend, then a week or three can pass with us barely stepping foot in the garden.

So this morning I peered through the kitchen window with some trepidation.

Now, fortunately there hadn’t been a frost - but if there had, I’d have been really annoyed. And our seedlings would likely have been worse than annoyed. They’d have been ex-seedlings.

So it got me thinking: wouldn’t it be handy to have a frost alarm?

You wouldn’t want need one during the winter months. Or in the summer for that matter. But during these delicate inbetween days (was it only three weeks ago we had a covering of snow?) it would help out disorganised would-be veg growers like me.

Perhaps it would be a web-based gadget that picked up on local weather forecasts and sent you a text message if the temperature dropped too low.

Or maybe an alert would be a triggered by a thermometer planted alongside the brassicas in your very own vegetable patch.

Either way, you’d be prompted to bring in your plants at the crucial time, or cover them with fleece. It could potentially save an entire future harvest.

Does anyone know of such a gadget? And if not, is it because I’m the only person in the world that thinks it might be useful?

IMAGE by Flickr user Clearly Ambiguous